Wednesday, August 10, 2016

Oh, who cares anyway...

This hit the news today. I would explain, but what's the point. It will be explained away with a "vast right wing conspiracy, so what difference at this point does it make?" excuse and everyone will drop it so they can exploit the next stupid thing that Donald Trump says. Just read the article because this will probably be the last time you will hear about it in the media.

It is a foregone conclusion that Hillary Clinton will win by a landslide just because no one cares enough to challenge her criminal activities from past and present or that her husband is a serial sexual predator. It doesn't matter enough to anyone, so they will be rewarded with keys to the White House. And a special congratulations to the "Never Trump" conservative pundits at National Review, Weekly Standard, and others for paving the way with their constant onslaught directed exlusively at Donald Trump and not one word about Hillary or any other issues. Though the Republicans may hold at least Congress, I predict that they will lose by a wide margin in the 2018 midterm elections in a clean sweep.

But on a lighter note:

Oh, and then there was this just in case you missed it. [Okay, we at CommentaramaPolitics rarely miss anything.] But since we have not discussed it, feel free to explain: When something looks like a bribe, acts like a bribe, and at least one side acknowledges it is a bribe, that it is not a bribe because Obama says emphatically it was not? I am sure this is the end of that story too.

Yeah, an interesting coincidence that at the very same time four American hostages were in a plane on the tarmac waiting to be released, an unmarked plane with pallets of non-US currency just happened to land. Whatever...they can lie, cheat, steal, and kill [Hat tip to Margaret Mitchell for that one.] and nobody cares, so why should I. If we are lucky, maybe Iran will just nuke us and put us out of our misery. At least I live in a primary target.

41 comments:

I've come to the sad conclusion that "conservatism" is dead because the current crop of conservatives are useless. They are totally out of touch with America and are proud of it, they are stuck in doomsday mode from all angles, and they are content to lose and kid themselves into thinking their failures make them noble... martyrs.

This just fits the pattern. It's easier to stab each other in the back than it is to defeat the bad guys.

I'll tell you what, Bev. Right now, the media is in the most blatant, most bizarre smear job I've ever seen in my life because the Trumps and the anti-Trumps are buying it hook line and sinker.

Forget concepts like fairness, hypocrisy and bias. No one is even thinking about those. Right now, the media is openly inventing scandals with ridiculous spin. Basically, they toss something out. And no matter how stupid, how obviously wrong, how hard-left propaganda it is... the right will run with it.

It's gotten to the point of farce.

Heck, it's gotten to the point of parody. I wouldn't doubt that places like CNN and MSNBC are sitting around asking, "How stupid are these people? Let's see who can make up the stupidest scandals that sticks." And so far, all contenders have succeeded.

And let me be clear, I'm not just talking about the anti-Trump stuff. The media is going full speed ahead on all fronts: anti-Trump, anti-Ryan, anti-capitalism, anti-GOP, anti-conservatism, anti-Reagan, etc. All of it is being lapped up on the right like Pavlov's dogs.

I can tell, Andrew, and feel the same way. I'm at a complete loss as to what to do about it all. I wonder how much lasting damage the left is going to do before it's all over. Haven't been watching the Olympics in order to answer your other question, sorry.

Rustbelt - I am very close to that point. I finally just unfollowed mostly every pundit/politician/annoying people on social media and am tuning out. I really don't care what happens because I have no control over what happens anyway.

Kit, there is a world of difference between conducting business with Russia and arranging political favors with Russia. If you want to get nitpicky, I have ties to Russia via the company I work for, which has sold underwater robotics to the Russian Navy. Aaaahhhh!!!

Now, I don't know how Trump's business dealings with Russia will influence his policy toward that country, but neither does anyone else. If I had to guess, I'd say Trump is motivated to keep business between the US and Russia open. Does that mean he'll turn a blind eye to some bad behavior from the Russians? Probably. But again, that's a world away from directly participating in the bad behavior a la the Clintons.

As for Trump's seeming admiration for Putin, if Trump isn't criticizing someone, he's praising them. Trump is incapable of withholding an opinion on other people, which tells me that those opinions are completely insincere. Given that Trump must, by his nature, either praise or insult Putin, which do you think is his better option? I'll give you a hint: if Trump went about blasting Putin, it would be counted as proof that he is unstable and angling for a war. And if he vacillated, as he often does, it would be read that way all the more so.

The most canny thing about Trump is he has everyone dismissing his canniness. He's devilish, that way.

Kit, one more thought: Trump may be unpalatable in a number of ways, but it's a mistake not to study him. He's already changed the way election campaigns will be run in the future. I'm frankly less concerned about what Hillary will do if she wins than I am about what Trump's supporters will do when they lose.

The parties have re-aligned. The Democrat party has been hollowed out in the middle, they have no middle class support. This was happening on it's own, but Trump is putting the last touches on it. To reuse a rhetorical device, Trump is less a pied piper than an anti-piper. His tune didn't attract the middle class because it didn't have to; he knew where they were already congregated. Instead, his tune drove out the rich donor class.

Ideally, the GOP would hang a sign that says "This way to the middle class" but that won't happen. I'm not sure what will happen instead, but populist movements tend to be aggressive, excessive, and to get their way. Fortune cookie, anyone?

Kit, to answer that question, we have to make some assumptions. I think it's fair to assume that most anti-Trumpers express support for another candidate. That means anything added by putting anti-Trump conservatives "in line" necessarily subtracts from someone else. Zero-sum game, in other words.

If a poll from April is accurate and still holds true, 20% of Republicans are NeverTrump, which means Trump would have an easy lead had they "simply gotten in line." I think that number is high, but maybe not far fetched.

We see an unusually strong third party candidate in Johnson, polling ~10%. He seems to pull evenly from both major party candidates, meaning if he were out, we'd see no change in Hillary or Trump's standings. But if Trump were a different candidate, I would expect Johnson to poll about as well as he did last time, ~5%. I'm going to assume most of the other 5% come from NeverTrumpers unwilling to back Hillary. That gets us back to a 3-5 point race.

Stein pulls mostly from Hillary, and I don't think she would pull much from any Republican.

So the only question remaining is how many Hillary backers are doing so because NeverTrump? I don't think anybody has that number, but it is a number I believe exists, and every point that would be taken from Hillary by NeverTrump's absence is a point given to Trump, so I think it's plausible that he would be leading in that case.

Another consideration, the likes of David French are furiously writing articles, and have been for some time now, repudiating the idea that NeverTrump has any influence whatsoever. They either believe it--which means they admit their own impotence--or they are trying to diminish their sense and appearance of responsibility.

A 3-5 point difference brings us up to about where Romney was 4 years ago. And given Trump's lack of anything resembling a campaign (one office in his must-win state of Florida and fewer ads than Jill "Harambe beats me" Stein) and how he'll be lucky if he pulls anything close to Romney's 20% of Hispanics (Bush won twice with 40+% twice) it's very unlikely he would be able to get enough to win the election.

He would still be losing. Just maybe not with an embarrassing 10-point gap.

Also, he's more or less consolidated the GOP vote. As FiveThirtyEight showed back around June, he has about 85% of the vote and 80-85% is pretty consistent for GOP candidates since 2000. That means Bush also grabbed that number —and won. That is why back in June everyone was giving funeral dirges for the NeverTrump movement.

Again, the problem is with the independents, who are going the Democratic Party (like they were in 2012).

Then came the conventions and the Khans and him dissing Paul Ryan, John McCain (again), and Kelly Ayotte. And the ties to Russia hitting the front pages. And everything else that made him look like an unhinged loon with a petty, vindictive streak.

I have no desire to be yanked into this discussion, so I won't be. But I will say this.

When one side has a lot of people so obsessively smearing their own candidate, you can't just look at their numbers to decide the effect of their behavior. You have to assume some level of influence which drags more people with them.

Hence, the damage to Trump from the right would be far greater than the 3-5% represented by the antiTrumps.

Anthony, It's obvious. They have taken over the new cycle much to the joy of the MSM and are landing body blows several times a day. And the rise of their concerted efforts have coincided perfectly with his dip in the polls.

That's what happens when your "loved ones" tell the world you're a child molesting serial killer who can't be trusted with nuclear weapons and might be clinically insane.

All those people just made future Secretary of Homeland Security Coulter's list of bimbos to be deported and none mean anything to Trump supporters. Their opposition shows just how much the Establishment fears Trump's awesomeness.

tryanmax said...

National Review has already been disinvited by the RNC from moderating a debate along with CNN. I can somewhat understand it: it's bad form for a moderator to have staked out a stance against a participant ahead of the debate. On the other hand, CNN.

I tend to agree with the cynics ahead of me ;-) that this will simply stand as proof that Trump has the Establishment® running scared. If there is one good to come out of this, it is that the lefties over at the Atlantic have finally recognized the distinction between a Republican and a conservative

AndrewPrice said...

The thing is, I don't think you can state a case "against Trump" because his supporters aren't "pro-Trump." They are "anti-establishment" and Trump is just the vehicle they are using. So whatever Trump is or isn't is irrelevant to his supporters because he doesn't matter.

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Furthermore, Trump has the love of Rush, Drudge, Breitbart and Hannity. All of those draw a lot more eyeballs than the National Reviews of the world so the most popular/ist conservative media is very pro-Trump though they have to spend a lot of time explaining how what he said wasn't really what he meant.

For my money Trump's brief rise and subsequent dip in the polls is due to the heavily watched conventions.

The shambolic Republican convention gave Trump a bit of a bounce (briefly putting him above Hillary).

The organized Democrat convention gave Hillary a bigger bounce (Bernie unlike Cruz threw in the towel) and baited Trump and his surrogates into going after the family of a dead soldier.

Trump is his own worst enemy. When early this week people starting talking about how the Clinton emails exposed the fact that her ineffective economic program was ineffective because it focused on helping wealthy donors rather than the jobless, a horrified Trump decided to get attention back on himself with a Clinton assassination joke. Mission accomplished!

----------------------------How much responsibility does Trump bear for his current electoral problems? The blame game we’re playing between Trump fans and #NeverTrumpers is fun but it conveniently obscures the question of how much blame the man himself should be charged with. Even Hannity scolded him recently for attacking Republicans on the stump instead of focusing on Clinton, and most Trumpers, I’m sure, would stipulate as an abstract matter that there are things he could be doing better. But that’s a boilerplate admission. Every candidate can always be doing things better. What I’m interested in is why the tone from fans like Hannity is so much sharper when criticizing anti-Trumpers than it is when criticizing the man himself. Trump is, after all, in the process of blowing a once-in-a-lifetime chance for a populist “outsider” to swoop in and win the presidency. He’s facing a wildly unpopular nominee who’s stuck trying to win a third straight term for her party, one of the heaviest lifts in American politics. He has an economic message tailor-made to win over working-class voters frustrated by years of sluggish wages and, until lately, a difficult job market. He came into the election with universal name recognition and has created an insatiable media appetite for him. And he has, allegedly, billions of dollars of wealth he could have used to build the best ground game and the best data analytics money can buy. He had every advantage. And he cannot, stop, stepping. on. his. own. d*ck. He’s getting blown out by a corrupt, charmless dynast widely perceived as a pathological liar, mainly because he can’t resist being a bomb-throwing blowhard even when he and his fans have everything to gain by him doing so. Where’s the outrage about that? Instead of attacking Trump, all Hannity wants to talk about is how people like Ted Cruz has “sabotaged” this loser because he wouldn’t endorse a guy who casually accused Cruz’s wife of being ugly and his father of maybe having helped murder Kennedy. I’m willing to listen to how immoral #NeverTrumpers are for not backing Trump if it’s one part of a 50-part argument where the other 49 parts are complaints about Trump having squandered his many, many chances. When do we reach that part of this debate?----------------------------

Also, someone needs to explain this "convention in shambles" business. It's clearly not important, because it hardly gets talked about. But on occasion, someone throws out that the DNC was better executed than the RNC, with zero elaboration. Is this just one of those well-known facts because everybody knows about it?

Anthony, I stand by that and that is not inconsistent with anything I've said.

When the primaries were going on, NR/etc.'s position was "Trump's positions do not make him a true believer!" and "Trump doesn't understand the establishment way!" and "Trump's not a serious man!" That was a HUGE positive with people who feel the system isn't working.

Now their attack is, "OMG! HE'S A CROSS-DRESSING CANNIBAL RACIST WHO FELATES PUTIN, WANTS TO MAKE HIS DAUGHTER QUEEN OF THE EARTH, AND WILL KILL US ALL WITH NUCLEAR WEAPONS!! OMG OMG OMG HE NEEDS TO BE STOPPED BY ANY MEANS POSSIBLE!!!"

Different effect.

Also, this statement misses the real issue ==> Furthermore, Trump has the love of Rush, Drudge, Breitbart and Hannity. All of those draw a lot more eyeballs than the National Reviews of the world so the most popular/ist conservative media is very pro-Trump though they have to spend a lot of time explaining how what he said wasn't really what he meant.

The issue isn't the 25,000 people who read National Review or the 1.5 million people who listen to Rush (that's likely his real audience). Those people are a rounding error in the election and the reach of those "news" organizations is irrelevant.

The issue is that the people who do reach the public -- ABC, NBC, CBS, PBS, FOX, the NYT, WashPo, the LA Times, the Chicago Tribune, etc. -- are able to say the following:

That's like your mother going on television and saying, "I always knew he was evil" when you've been charged with raping nuns. That's a damaging attack and it's the kind those media organizations, who do reach tens of millions of voters every day, could not make when it was just "Another liberal lobbyist says Trump is evil."

Really? The neverTrumps have been "debating" this every day all day since as far back as I can remember. They are obsessed and won't stop. Seriously, find me a day where they aren't out attacking Trump over and over and over at every website and magazine they can.

The reason Allahpundit thinks there's no debate is because he's just repeating the same crap obsessively over and over, which the #notobsessed have already considered and decided doesn't make them hate Trump with the passion of the sun. Hence, they aren't joining Allahpundit in his Trump-hate obsession, which he wants to see as them refusing to debate the issue.

Andrew (and Kit), that is exactly the point. Allahpundit complains about Trump "getting blown out by a corrupt, charmless dynast widely perceived as a pathological liar" which is the only time in the last year that any of these "conservative" pundits have said one word about Clinton at al. I have read pretty much everything that Jonah Goldberg, Rich Lowry, John Podhoratz, and all of the other avowed #NeverTrump pundits have written...and none of it has been about "a corrupt, charmless dynast widely perceived as a pathological liar" not Trump. I have followed them for years in magazines, newsprint, and in the last year on Twitter. They have doen nothing but agree with followers of that "corrupt, charmless dynast widely perceived as a pathological liar".

Btw, I hope you caught that Allahpundit couldn't even bring himself to critized Clinton in this by adding in the "perceived" in that sentence when referring to Clinton. There is nothing "perceived" about that, but hey...why bother.

Bev, That's the problem with obsession. You start focusing on your target to the exclusion of all others. You find reasons to keep bringing it up in any context. You lose any sense of proportion and reject any comparison that goes against your narrative. You turn against those who won't share your obsession. And you lose the ability to see how you come across.

Since Goldberg has been raised, I must say, I'm very concerned about him going forward. Much as I enjoy his brand of humor in skewering his ideological opponents, I'm afraid he's enjoying his role as conservative Trump-skewerist too much. Exhibit A: Clinton is no less a Liberal Fascist than she was yesterday, but Goldberg has inhaled the Kool-Aid that Trump's imagined future mistakes are on par with, if not worse than, her proven transgressions. My worry is that he's going to take his feeling forward and devote his career to being the conservative panelist who attacks conservatives. If he does, it's a major loss.

The National Review's initial objection to Trump was that until five second ago Trump was a Democrat, and that he was a populist who appealed to both racial resentment and a desire for big government.

As for the mainstream media using outlets like the National Review against Trump, I haven't seen it and I follow the news quite closely. Prominent current and former politicians (think governors, Senators and high ranking bureaucrats) coming out against or even merely declining to support Trump gets airtime, conservative writers not so much.

Anyway, below is a big chunk of Kit's summary of the against Trump National Review issue. Consistent with what they are saying nowadays.

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It features this killer line: "Trump is a philosophically unmoored political opportunist who would trash the broad conservative ideological consensus within the GOP in favor of a free-floating populism with strong-man overtones."

First, the best: Thomas Sowell: "What is even more remarkable is that, after seven years of repeated disasters, both domestically and internationally, under a glib egomaniac in the White House, so many potential voters are turning to another glib egomaniac to be his successor."

Brent Bozell III: "A real conservative walks with us. Ronald Reagan read National Review and Human Events for intellectual sustenance; spoke annually to the Conservative Political Action Conference, Young Americans for Freedom, and other organizations to rally the troops; supported Barry Goldwater when the GOP mainstream turned its back on him; raised money for countless conservative groups; wrote hundreds of op-eds; and delivered even more speeches, everywhere championing our cause. Until he decided to run for the GOP nomination a few months ago, Trump had done none of these things, perhaps because he was too distracted publicly raising money for liberals such as the Clintons; championing Planned Parenthood, tax increases, and single-payer health coverage; and demonstrating his allegiance to the Democratic party"

Interesting: there's an algae bloom of articles about Hilary's health, except none of them are about Hilary's health. They're either demands for answers to questions no one has asked or sneers about how disgusting those non existent questions are.

This election is not about policy, for anybody still under that delusion, which some who are still lamenting the absence of conservatism may be.

I always though of NPR as a network that wasn't mass market, that aside from Sesame Street, catered to a small group of older, well educated liberals.

I remember a spate of articles celebrating the National Review coming out against Trump, but honestly I haven't seen anything recently, nor does a google search turn up any hits.

Republicans against Trump is a running theme in the liberal media, but the people cited tend to be people/institutions who are higher profile rather than conservative writers the average person couldn't pick out of a line-up.

How about contradicting something I actually said? I stated the opposition of the NeverTrump writers was covered in the mainstream media when declared, but recent articles have focused on higher profile Republicans so blaming the original NeverTrumpers for Trump's very recent decline doesn't make much sense.

Half your links are months old (back when Trump was riding high in polls) and one of the remaining two is merely a list of Republicans known to oppose Trump.

The recent article that remains focuses on Scarborough and supports my point.

Could it be possible that Joe Scarborough and Donald Trump have finally broken up?

Morning Joe has done more than any other TV show to legitimize Donald Trump’s candidacy, relentlessly pushing the narrative that Trump was unstoppable.

Jonah Goldberg put it well in the blog linked above: for months on end, Mika and Joe were like Mean Girls whenever anyone dared to take on their good buddy.

But the recent flood of articles, editorials, and blogs about Trump’s manifest unfitness for office has seemed to nudge them to start criticizing Joe’s longtime pal and the show’s frequent phone guest.

However, early this week you could still find Joe defending Trump, this time against charges of racism. Trump of course, with his love of hyperbole, had said that he’s the “least racist person” you’ll ever meet. But you can’t trust much of anything he says. As Mary McCarthy put it about rival author Lillian Hellman: “every word...is a lie, including ‘and’ and ‘the’.”

recent articles have focused on higher profile Republicans so blaming the original NeverTrumpers for Trump's very recent decline doesn't make much sense

That only makes sense if you don't believe NR and NPR don't influence politicians and give them cover for concurring views. I can't believe I even have to write that.

As to the age of my links, their age only lends support to the idea that HuffPo readers know who Jonah Goldberg is. Their content beyond that is besides that point.

Also, if you still think this election is about truth and seriousness, you really missed the boat. It's all about emotion and, to that, who can stir up the most fear. But as I said elsewhere, nothing matters until October. Decades of expert agreement can't be wrong.

Tryanmax - I have stopped even going to HuffPo. It is just too frustrating with the All Trump Bad all the time. They haven't changed the screaming 10 in headline featuring the 40Ft. TRUMP DID SOMETHING STUPID, SO THAT WE CAN IGNORE ANYTHING ABOUT CLINTON'S LIES stories